I’ve had the LG Watch Sport for about a year, and a while back it started acting up. What kind of problem? See for yourself:

I was using a ThinkPad X250 before this, and I upgraded it bit by bit over time, but I had a few complaints about that laptop: Cooling was terrible. Hook it up to a dock and it hits 90°C in no time, and breaking 100°C was routine. I tried modding it, but it was basically useless. Performance was lacking. With the dock running dual 1080p displays, it just couldn’t handle it—open YouTube and performance explodes. Build quality was so-so. The ThinkPad X250 was a step back from the X230 in terms of build. It’s all fiberglass, even though every media outlet hypes it as carbon fiber. It’s not, and there’s no metal either. Fiberglass, plainly put… is plastic. Overall, the laptop was okay at first, but later it started to annoy me, so I planned to upgrade after two years. This time I looked at the X270, but found nothing new, and it seems the ThinkPad series has given up on the X200 line. So my targets were the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and Yoga.

Last year I bought the first-gen Moto 360, swapped the band later, and it turned out great. I wore it for a full year and honestly it changed my life a little. Now the upgrade, Moto 360 2nd, is here — redesigned lugs, better battery life, more customization options, and an official China release. I wasn’t really unhappy with the first gen. Battery was enough for me, and the second gen’s “a bit over a day” feels awkward anyway — you still have to charge it at night… The main reason I bought the Moto 360 2nd is… looks. I hated the black first-gen Moto 360. Plenty of people saw it and said it looked like plastic. So while I was kicking myself for not buying silver, I kept refreshing the Google Store until the silver version came back in stock, ordered it and shipped it through a forwarding service. Arrived without a hitch.

Bought the ChromeCast on Black Friday. The point was to test EMS’s official overseas forwarding service. Turns out that forwarder is deeply unreliable — this $19 thing from Amazon US took a month to reach me, and it went missing a couple of times along the way. Anyway, it arrived. A lot of people probably want to know what this thing is good for, and how it can still be used in China in 2015. So let me run through it briefly.

Originally I just wanted a Nexus 6. After a year and change with a Sony, I’d decided Android is better off with something close to stock. But this time around they announced the Nexus 9 and Nexus 6 together, so I got carried away and bought both. The Nexus 6 is still on a plane; the Nexus 9 arrived a week ago. Here’s roughly how it went. I bought straight from the Google Play store. Lots of people say that if the credit card billing address you register with Google Wallet doesn’t match the forwarding company’s receiving address, Google will cancel your order — and that Google cancels orders like a maniac. From what I can tell, most of those people had never had a Google Wallet account, maybe not even a Google account. They rushed to sign up through some temporary proxy just to buy a Nexus, then rushed to place an order, so of course Google figured them for scalpers or a sketchy account. So basically: if you’ve bought things with Google Wallet before, or you’ve had a Google account for ages, Google will let the billing-address thing slide. Mine went through fine. Google Play doesn’t ship directly. You can buy the Nexus 9 from Amazon with direct shipping, but there’s $70 in tax, so forwarding is cheaper. I used Benniao (笨鸟海淘) as the forwarder — partly because I couldn’t get registered with 转运中国, and the other forwarders were either backed up or banned electronics. Benniao was just okay, honestly. Not what I’d call fast: 25 days from shipment to delivery. Four of those days were bad luck landing on a weekend when they’re closed, so I had to wait until Monday for shipping and customs to continue. I got the 32GB black version. Forwarding cost 70 RMB, and customs hit me for 200 RMB on the electronics. Work out the total yourself if you care.